The Bounerim

The Bounerim

Release type: Shareware
Release date: 1993 (original release)
Levels: 10
Author: Don'Pan Software
Registration bonus: N/A
Registration price: $20
Related games: none

FULL ENTRY COMING SOON!

Q&A

Reaching for a point in The Bounerim

From what we can see, Bounerim is a labyrinthine platformer where you control a red ball that hides a laser-spitting eye. You mentioned several times that Orb: The Derelict Planet was one of your favourite G-M game. Was it an inspiration source here?

That's an interesting coincidence, since you mention it. Actually, the first I learned of Orb was the Game-Maker 3.0 CD-ROM. Although my memory is far from exact, I think that Bounerim was one of my earliest games. It may well be my second platformer, after A-J's Quest, and is probably contemporary with Cireneg's Rings, Linear Volume, and Gridline. So that's probably around mid-1993, I'm guessing.

If there's an inspiration, it was a bunch of self-produced clipart that I had sitting around. Deluxe Paint famously had a brush function, that people often used to store sprites or small portable images (thus the Monkey Island protagonist, Guybrush Threepwood). I had been using Deluxe Paint since the late 1980s, and so had built up a wealth of small images that I would occasionally stamp here and there, or just hang onto for posterity. I think that I took Bounerim as an opportunity to air a whole bunch of those resources at once, in what at the time struck me as a humorous jumble.

We fight against walking alarm clocks, hand-waving cacti, potatoes, pumpkins and... flying heads. Pretty unusual. Is that a reference to any co-worker?

No, aside from a chance to air random Deluxe Paint brushes there's no rhyme or reason to the adversaries. The head is of course my personal hero, Groucho Marx.

We can hear that you had fun with the sounds on that one. Have they received a special attention?

I think from the moment that RSD added Sound Blaster support I kind of went overboard with the microphone and waveform editor. A common theme to my early to mid-era games is increasingly outlandish sound effects, especially in regards to monster death. One of these days I should probably compile a list of all of my monster death noises. My favorite may well be the one from Fluffy Ralph. But yes, much as with the sprites I think I gave this game a similar kitchen sink treatment. Aside from the rough concept of (generally) sharp things popping a ball, there's no logical order to this game at all.

If you're wondering what's sharp about Groucho Marx, then surely you haven't faced his wit.

Bounerim could be an afternoon project to show off how the thing works, but it could also be the prelude to something more ambitious (I guess counting the levels would tell). Had you a precise goal/motivation when you started it ?

Aside from what I've said, I think my only motivation was to experiment a bit more with side-scrolling platformer mechanics. I can trace a direct line from my work here to the much more polished Octolris, which I probably tackled fairly soon after. This may be the first time I really played with Game-Maker to see what it can do; A-J's Quest, I'd had planned for four years before I even heard of Game-Maker. Most of the other games that I did around the same time were facile edits of RSD's Sample and Terrain. Now that I think about it, before Bounerim I probably hadn't pushed either myself or the design tools very far.

There's an impressive amount of 1-UPs in that sample level. How tempting is it to hide such things in a game? It somehow makes you better prepared for battle compared to any one else, right?

Yes, my early tendency was for hidden passages and false walls all over the place. I still love a few of those, sensibly placed, but my placement was rarely sensible. One of the first comments I got from RSD is that they felt my use of false walls was kind of unfair for the player, so I took that on board and after my first few games I tried to dial them down a bit. As for why I have so many 1-Ups scattered around here... I couldn't say. I probably didn't think it through very deeply.

Story

You were an ordinary guy, well, at least pretty ordinary. While walking down the street one day, you saw a little green crystal on the sidewalk. You picked it up, and as soon as you did so, your mind started swirling. The sidewalk turned green and the sky into a mass of purple waves.

You regain your senses, but feel sort of strange. You try to stand up, but you don't feel any legs. You attempt to look around, but you can't turn your neck. You can, however, roll around. You gaze at your reflection in a polished spike jutting from the ground and see a rubber ball. You yelp at this, although you don't hear your voice, and hop back. . .about ten feet. When you land, you bounce another three feet or so. Suddenly, a voice booms out of the sky:

"You are now a bounerim. You are my prisoner. Don't even contemplate escaping. My guards will pop you before you can even start to roll."

You stop to think of what has happened, and realize that the green crystal had to have been what did this. You know that you somehow have to get it back. You roll forward a bit and see a strange purple hole in the middle of nothing. You get excited and when you run for it, you all of a sudden see about a hundred percent better than before and a swirling beam of light comes from your pupil. You think, "This is a strange place, whatever it is."

Instructions

Up: Jump Up

Up-Left: Jump Left

Up-Right: Jump right

Left, Right: Roll Those Ways

<SPACE>: Shoot Normal Shot

B: Shoot Weak-But-Fast Shot

N: Shoot Slow-But Strong Shot

Credits

A-J Games Team:

Games:

Eric-Jon Waugh

Game Testers:

Jim Faux

Lan Hasty

Game Engine:

Recreational Software Designs (RSD)

Special Thanx to:

Oliver Stone

Mom

Strahd

Matt Bell